Darwin’s slippery slide into unbelief

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Charles Darwin’s thinking and writing on the subject of evolution and natural
selection caused him to reject the evidence for God in nature and ultimately to
renounce the Bible, God, and the Christian faith.

Early religious influences and thoughts

Wikipedia

Charles Darwin

Darwin did not lack religious influences in his youth. Baptized an Anglican and
steeped in his mother’s Unitarianism, young Charles was brought up to pray.
He used to run the mile or so from home to school, concerning which he wrote, ‘I
often had to run very quickly to be on time, and from being a fleet runner was generally
successful; but when in doubt I prayed earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember
that I attributed my success to the prayers and not to my quick running, and marvelled
how generally I was aided’.1

He had dropped out of medical studies after two years at Edinburgh, and his father
suggested to him the calling of an Anglican clergyman. Charles wasn’t sure
whether he could accept everything in the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church
of England. However, he later wrote, ‘I liked the thought of being a country
clergyman. Accordingly I read with care "Pearson on the Creed"and a few
other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and
literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed
must be fully accepted’.2

During his three years of theological studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge,
he was greatly impressed by Paley’s Evidences of Christianity and
his Natural Theology (which argues for the existence of God from design).
He recalled, ‘I could have written out the whole of the "Evidences"
with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley’,3
and, ‘I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s
"Natural Theology." I could almost formerly have said it by heart’.4
In a letter of condolence to a bereaved friend at that time, he wrote of ‘so
pure and holy a comfort as the Bible affords’, compared with ‘how useless
the sympathy of all friends must appear’.5

His intention to enter the ministry, he wrote, was never ‘formally given up,
but died a natural death’ when, on leaving Cambridge, he joined HMS Beagle
as unpaid naturalist.6 However, the religious influences in his life
did not abate. His official position was that of gentleman companion to the captain,
and for the next five years Darwin heard the Bible read and expounded on a regular
basis. Captain Robert FitzRoy was a deeply religious man who believed every word
in the Bible and personally conducted divine service every Sunday, at which attendance
by all on board was compulsory. Darwin later recalled his own doctrinal orthodoxy
when, in discussion with some of the officers, much to their amusement he quoted
the Bible as ‘an unanswerable authority on some point of morality’.7
And at Buenos Aires, he and another officer requested a chaplain to administer the
Lord’s Supper to them before they ventured into the wilds of Tierra del Fuego.8

The progress of unbelief

Despite all of the above religious influences in his life, the decline of Darwin’s
faith began when he first started to doubt the truth of the first chapters of Genesis.
This unwillingness to accept the Bible as meaning what it said probably started
with and certainly was greatly influenced by his shipboard reading matter—the
newly published first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology
(the second volume, published after the Beagle left England, was sent on
to Darwin in Montevideo). This was a revolutionary book for that time. It subtly
ridiculed belief in recent creation in favour of an old earth, and denied that Noah’s
Flood was worldwide; this, of course, was also a denial of divine judgment. Based
on James Hutton’s dictum that all natural processes have continued as they
were from the beginning (2
Peter 3:4), or ‘uniformitarianism’, Lyell’s book presented
Darwin with the time frame of vast geological ages needed to make his theory of
natural selection as the mechanism of evolution ‘work’. One of Darwin’s
biographers calls Charles’s reading of this book his ‘point of departure
from orthodoxy’.9 And when Lyell died in 1875, Darwin said, ‘I
never forget that almost everything which I have done in science I owe to the study
of his great works’.10

Inevitably, the more Darwin convinced himself that species had originated by chance
and developed by a long course of gradual modification, the less he could accept
not only the Genesis account of creation, but also the rest of the Old Testament
as the divinely inspired Word of God. In his Autobiography, Darwin wrote,
‘I had gradually come by this time, i.e. 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old
Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos or the
beliefs of any barbarian’.11

When Darwin came to write up the notes from his scientific investigations he faced
a choice. He could interpret what he had seen either as evidence for the Genesis
account of supernatural creation, or else as evidence for naturalism, consistent
with Lyell’s theory of long ages. In the event, he chose the latter—that
everything in nature has come about through accidental, unguided purposelessness
rather than as the result of divinely guided, meaningful intention,12
and, after several years, in 1859 his Origin of Species13 was
the result. On the way, in 1844, he wrote to his friend, Joseph Hooker, ‘I
am almost convinced … that species are not (it is like confessing a murder)
immutable’. Concerning this, Ian Taylor writes, ‘Many commentators have
pointed out that the "murder" he spoke of was in effect the murder of
God’.14

Having abandoned the Old Testament, Darwin then renounced the Gospels. This loss
of belief was based on several factors, including his rejection of miracles: ‘the
more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become’;
his rejection of the credibility of the Gospel writers: ‘the men of that time
were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us’; his
rejection of the Gospel chronology: ‘the Gospels cannot be proved to have
been written simultaneously with the events’; and his rejection of the Gospel
events: ‘they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed
to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses’. Summing
up the above, he wrote, ‘by such reflections as these … I gradually
came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation’.15 On
another occasion he wrote, ‘I never gave up Christianity until I was forty
years of age’.16 He turned 40 in 1849. Commenting on this, Darwin’s
biographer, James Moore, says, ‘… just as his clerical career had died
a slow "natural death," so his faith had withered gradually’.17

One immediate effect of Darwin’s rejection of the Bible was his loss of all
comfort from it. The hopeless grief of his later letters to the bereaved contrasts
sharply with the earlier letter of condolence quoted above. In 1851, his dearly
loved daughter Annie, aged 10, died from what the attending physician called a ‘Bilious
Fever with typhoid character’.18 Charles was devastated, and wrote,
‘Our only consolation is that she passed a short, though joyous life’.19
Two years later, to a friend who had lost a child, Darwin’s only appeal was
to ‘time’, which ‘softens and deadens … one’s feelings
and regrets’.20

The role models of his forebears

One major factor that contributed to Charles’s apostasy is worth noting—the
role model of his father, Robert, and of his grandfather, Erasmus.21
Both were ‘freethinkers’, so disbelief was an acceptable trait within
the Darwin family—perceived not as ‘a moral crisis or rebellion’,
but perhaps even as ‘a filial duty’.22 Indeed, in 1838, when
Charles had become engaged to Emma Wedgwood, a very devout Unitarian, Robert had
felt the need to advise his son to conceal his religious doubts from his wife—other
households did not discuss such things.23

Surrounded as he was by unbelievers, and having soaked his mind in literature that
rejected the concept of divine judgment in earth’s history, Charles mused,
‘I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if
so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe,
and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will
be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine’.24

Descent into darkness

The descent into darkness did not stop there. In 1876, in his Autobiography,
Darwin wrote, ‘Formerly I was led … to the firm conviction of the existence
of God and the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing
in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, "it is not possible to
give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion,
which fill and elevate the mind". I well remember my conviction that there
is more in man than the mere breath of his body. But now the grandest scenes would
not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind’.25
In 1880, in reply to a correspondent, Charles wrote, ‘I am sorry to have to
inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore
not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God’.26 In the last year of his
life, when the Duke of Argyll suggested to him that certain purposes seen in nature
‘were the effect and the expression of mind,’ Charles looked at him
very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force;
but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems
to go away’.27 And about the same time he wrote to his old friend,
Joseph Hooker, ‘I must look forward to Down graveyard as the sweetest place
on earth’.28,29

Conclusion

Thus did this tragically mistaken man drift from a childlike trust in One who helped
him run to school on time into an abyss of hopelessness and agnosticism.30
While the spiritual journey of a Christian is a journey out of darkness into Christ’s
marvellous light, that of Charles Darwin was a slippery slide out of Gospel light
(although not saving spiritual sight) into the sheer ‘blackness of darkness
for ever’.31

Darwin’s unbelief, like that of so many people today, had its roots in a mind
which first rejected the revelation of God in the Bible and then was unwilling to
accept the revelation of God which God Himself has given in nature. This religion
of revelation, of the Bible, of the Lord Jesus Christ, will keep us tuned to truth,
hope, and life in God, and away from evolutionism, humanism, and atheism, only as
we allow it to exercise its power in our hearts. The tragedy of Charles Darwin is
that he never did.

ibid,Vol. 1, p. 277. Note: the words ‘or the beliefs of any barbarian’
in Charles’s original Autobiography (written in 1876 for his family)
were deleted by his son, Francis, at the insistence of his widow, Emma, in the version
published after his death, as were his views on the Old Testament, namely, what
he called, ‘its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel,
the rainbow as a sign, etc. etc.’ (ref. 8, p. 317). The uncensored version
of the autobiography, published by Charles’s granddaughter, Lady Nora Barlow,
in 1958, contained some 6,000 words expunged by Francis and Emma, much of which
related to Charles’s irreligious nature, and which ‘might embarrass
the Darwin name’. (Source: Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, TFE Publishing,
Toronto, 1984, pp. 115 and 449, note 1.)

Charles Darwin wrote many other monographs and books, of which the most well known
is probably The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,
which deals inter alia with human evolution, published in 1871.

Ref. 1, p. 278. Curiously, Darwin continued, ‘But I was very unwilling to
give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often
[sic] inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts
being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner
all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with
free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince
me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.
The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.’

Although Erasmus died seven years before Charles was born, Charles undoubtedly was
familiar with both his liberal views and his writings about evolution. Charles read
Erasmus’s book Zoonomia twice, once in his youth and ‘a second
time after an interval of ten or fifteen years’ (Ref. 1, Vol. 1, p. 34).

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